AspireAssist: The Roman vomitorium may be coming back

The FDA recently approved a device called AspireAssist, a pump that will drain your stomach through a valve inserted into the abdominal wall. Want to know more about how this will work? Check out this short instructional; it's a cartoon so nothing graphic is shown.

It allows an obese person to empty 30% of the contents of their stomach directly into the toilet thus immediately dumping 30% of the calories they consumed at their last meal before the body has a chance to process it for nutrients. A clinical trial consisted of 111 patients treated with AspireAssist and appropriate lifestyle therapy, and 60 control patients who received only the lifestyle therapy. One year later, patients using AspireAssist lost an average of 12.1% of their total body weight while the control patients only lost 3.6% percent. The AspireAssist is only intended to be used for people “who have failed to achieve and maintain weight loss through non-surgical weight-loss therapy.”

However, both groups saw improvements in conditions often associated with obesity. While the control group was going at a slower pace, they were seeing improvement, thus proving they were not failing to achieve and maintain weight loss. In fact, due to the lifestyle changes they were making to get those results, without dumping their stomach contents after each meal, they may be more likely to maintain because they have learned how to eat correctly – more testing would actually be needed to find out if one or both groups keep the weight off once the tubes stop working. And isn't that where the real problem is with obesity treatment? Quick fixes are wanted instead of slow, steady lifestyle changes that must be upkept for life.

Yoni Freedhoff, MD, the director of the Bariatric Medical Institute in Ottawa, Canada stated, “It’s not society’s job to judge [the AspireAssist] based on whether they think it’s morally okay or not. Our opinions should be based on evidence and results.” It's hard to take such a statement seriously when the evidence showed that results were being accomplished without placing a hole and a tube in the stomach's of the control group.

Some news outlets have dubbed the AspireAssist the “bulmia machine,” but a society far in the past had something exactly like this. The Roman vomitorium. During feasts Romans who consumed their fill would head to the vomitorium, rid their stomachs of everything they'd eaten and then return to eating. This simply removes the need to worry about one's teeth when excusing themselves to the vomitorium. 

The instruction cartoon advises to chew slowly because one patient reported that the machine clogs when emptying certain foods, like cauliflower, broccoli, snow peas, pretzels and steak.